YUCCA auxin biosynthetic genes are required for Arabidopsis shade avoidance

Patricia Müller-Moulé; Kazunari Nozue; Melissa L Pytlak; Christine M Palmer; Michael F Covington; Andreah D Wallace; Stacey L Harmer; Julin N Maloof

doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.2211v2

YUCCA auxin biosynthetic genes are required for Arabidopsis shade avoidance

Patricia Müller-Moulé¹, Kazunari Nozue¹, Melissa L Pytlak¹, Christine M Palmer^1,2, Michael F Covington^1,3, Andreah D Wallace¹, Stacey L Harmer¹, Julin N Maloof ¹

1 Department of Plant Biology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, United States

2 Natural Sciences Department, Castleton University, Castleton, Vermont, United States

3 Amaryllis Nucleics, Berkeley, CA, United States

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.2211v2

Published: 2016-09-11
Accepted: 2016-09-10

Subject Areas: Developmental Biology, Genetics, Plant Science
Keywords: auxin, shade avoidance, phytochrome, photomorphogenesis

Licence: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.

Cite this article: Müller-Moulé P, Nozue K, Pytlak ML, Palmer CM, Covington MF, Wallace AD, Harmer SL, Maloof JN. 2016. YUCCA auxin biosynthetic genes are required for Arabidopsis shade avoidance. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2211v2 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2211v2

Abstract

Plants respond to neighbor shade by increasing stem and petiole elongation. Shade, sensed by phytochrome photoreceptors, causes stabilization of PHYTOCHROME INTERACTING FACTOR proteins and subsequent induction of YUCCA auxin biosynthetic genes. To investigate the role of YUCCA genes in phytochrome-mediated elongation we examined auxin signaling kinetics after an end-of-day far-red (EOD-FR) light treatment, and found that an auxin responsive reporter is rapidly induced within 2 hours of far-red exposure. YUCCA2, 5, 8, and 9 are all induced with similar kinetics suggesting that they could act redundantly to control shade-mediated elongation. To test this hypothesis we constructed a yucca2,5,8,9 quadruple mutant and found that the hypocotyl and petiole EOD-FR and shade avoidance are completely disrupted. This work shows that YUCCA auxin biosynthetic genes are essential for detectable shade avoidance and that YUCCA genes are important for petiole shade avoidance.

Author Comment

This version changes in response to reviewer comments at PeerJ. The manuscript has been updated to more clearly describe experimental conditions. We also better distinguish between end-of-day far-red (EOD-FR) and low red:fr (R:FR) treatments and fixed a number of minor errors.